This is a wonderful precise demonstration of something I've needed for a long time!!! (No more converting to PDF to extract the pages and then converting them back to Word.) THANK YOU!
I have headers in my document and have since 'hide them. I applied the "heading 1 style" at top. When I hit "Create" is says Selection does not consist of Heading Levels. What am I doing wrong?
Hi this is great and I've followed the directions step by step, however my documents will not split. It opens up the doc with multiple links on them. Do you know how this can be fixed?
Brilliant! I struggle with this process once each quarter and it's always a battle and today it wouldn't work at all. After fighting all morning I found your vid which is simpler than my previous process which I got online a couple of years back, and it's worked first time. I've updated my notes and will do it this way in future. Took me a while to find this btw as all the other searches returned VBA macros which is an unnecessarily complex
Just want to chime in here with a huge THANK YOU as well! This has been a huge time saver for me, and there is no way I would have figured this out without your video. 🙏🙏🙏
Thank you very much! Curious why it has to be heading 1 and not others. Also, this trick worked for saving the docs separately, but it did not retain my special design features I had around the document.
Thank you so much! You video is useful. However, I encountered problem that I'm unable to view the letter head on the split word document. Could you please advise the work around, many thanks
I have found that when Save at the end of this process fails to produce any files in the folder you're using, the saved files you want may be stored on your hard drive in memory, eg: C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.MSO\odd version of your file name 012.docx
This works great, though I'm having two issues: 1) My original mail merge document has a header in it, which consists of an image and some text. The header doesn't appear in Outline view, and therefore is not appearing in any of the generated Word files. 2) My original mail merge document is only one page, but in the resulting individual files the text is split over three pages. The process is adding in a bunch of extra blank lines. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks for this!
Thank you very much for the video It really helped me. At first It did not work for me then I checked some of the comments, Luckily I found my answer in the comments.
Great video!! Really helpful. However, could this be done using any other style to separate the files? I am using the Title 1 for the document and an index, so if I try to do it like you did, each section becomes its own document. Thank you very much in advance.
This is very helpful, I am running into an issue though - instead of creating separate files it is creating a new word document with links to open new word file - any suggestions. thank you
I'm creating individual forms for different company departments using mail merge. In the past, I just cycled through each individual preview, saved the file with the department name, and reopened, saying "no" to the prompt to engage the mail merge. That has worked for me in the past, but now I can seem to "break" the mail merge in the document. When I say "no" and save again, it still engages the mail merge when I reopen. So I googled and found your video, which is great! But I encountered a problem. Word 365 recently changed the default template, which uses a different font, paragraph and line spacing, and color palette. All of the individual documents that were created following your steps above swapped out my original formatting for the new formatting. Perhaps if I change "default" and the various "heading" levels to my preference, rather than the format Word is forcing on me?
I have two pages document with 88 pages altogether which means 44 letters but adding a heading on the first page is not working correctly. It breaks the section properly but as soon as I click on "Create" I get the error message "The selection does not consist of heading levels"
this was great however it did not save to the actual folder the main letter was located in. I had to search for it and it saved it to a funky place. my mail merge was not a letter therefore I had to add their name to the top part and hide it so it would save them according to the name of the individual. It took me a while but i finally got it. thank you for this tutorial.
Very clear video, but it still only saves a single document. And when I click the links in the subdocuments, the formatting is weird. (missing the Heading image, adding extra line breaks between paragraphs).
Thank you very much for this important lesson... I have a problem when I split the documents then all the format are changed such as letter types, size... etc and I dont know why or how can I prevent this to happen.. would you help please?
thanks! It kind of worked but: 1. it took 45 minutes to generate 75 documents (on the newest M2 macbook) 2. all files had not file ending (docx. missing) so I need to rename each file in order to use it as a word document For my needed 580 pages it would run all night long. Isn´t there an app to do that? I saw one which is generating PDF but I need docx. But it helps allready a lot.
@@lankatax I believe you can't do that through mail merge. You can add plugins to Word that'll allow you to do so. I wrote a JS script that converts all my word docs into PDFs
I had a number of problems. Firstly it saved the documents in some system file location that I couldn't access easily...[.... AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.MSO\...]. I had hyperlinks to open each but then found that it didn't save the header (logo)and footer (address, etc) information. For now I'm just going to have to print and scan each letter individually but would love to know what has gone wrong. Frustrated!
I figured this out, but now each individual document has a blank page at the end - I removed footer/header - there is nothing that I can see - need help please.
This didn't work for me. I followed all the instructions, but after the last step there are no new documents in the folder, just the one "all letters" master document. Not sure if there's some extra save step at the end? I tried save, and save as but neither worked.
This wasn't working for me and I tried it several times!! It turns out I was working on files in OneDrive and trying to save the separate files to OneDrive. As soon as I changed to my local workstation, it worked perfectly.
I have been able to complete this, however the save destination is a hidden location deep within windows files, in hidden system folders that I cannot access due to company's settings - not the location I start the merge in. Is there anyway for me to point word to the correct save location? Anyone else have an issue with this? This is the location it is saving to: C:\Users\my.name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.MSO\IndividualFile1.docx
an extra page is added at the end. i have used only one page format but i am getting and extra 2nd blank page in all the individual documents. can we rectify
Does this work on documents of 9 pages? I recently ran a mail merge with a 9 page document which worked great, but I need to separate out each of the documents.
when you click save, how did you manage to have all the files named after the recipient names? can you customize how the files are named to a specific column?
I think Word automatically named the documents with the first word of each file. Here it took the Addressee's name as it was the first word of each document after empty Heading1. My workaround was to Type the desired document name in Heading1 style and then change its colour to white so that it's not visible. The name was also a merged field chosen from excel data.
I am facing an issue with heading1 style. So i want to create documents which start with the "Product Code" - "product Description" - "Company Name". e.g. AB-9999 - N&A Apple Flavor - ABC Company I did follow your steps but turns out all files were created with only the 1st 2 Characters of the 1st merged field (Product Code) before "-". After a couple of tries with different scenarios, the conclusion is, Outlined files only create with only one merged field as document name and without special characters like "-&@...etc". Please if you know how to work around, do let me know because I don't want to use Macros.
I think Word automatically named the documents with the first word of each file. Here it took the Addressee name as it was the first word of each document after empty Heading1. My work around was to Type the desired document name in Heading1 style and then changing its colour to white so that its not visible. The name was also a merged field chosen from excel data.
![Split a Mail Merged document into SEPARATE documents with custom file names [No Coding]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/MsUpz6docZA/mqdefault.jpg)
![Split a Mail Merged document into SEPARATE documents with custom file names [No Coding]](/img/tr.png)
Worth noting you have to save this in a non sync'd folder to One Drive for it to work. C/username/docs will do.
ah! Thanks for adding this note! It wasn't working for me until I saved it to a folder in my C drive. Thank you!!!!
Thank you - this helped
This is very important observation, else on onedrive linked files, it won't do the job.
thank you so so so much, honestly I spent 2 days trying to work out what I was doing wrong! You life saviour
This was a very important missing step! Thank you so much! 👍🏽
This is a wonderful precise demonstration of something I've needed for a long time!!! (No more converting to PDF to extract the pages and then converting them back to Word.)
THANK YOU!
Glad it was helpful!
@@ChesterTugwell, sir individual documents are not created, can you please help...🙏
I have headers in my document and have since 'hide them. I applied the "heading 1 style" at top. When I hit "Create" is says Selection does not consist of Heading Levels. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for the info. Do you have any recommendations on how to do this with a header and footer in the mail merge?
Hi this is great and I've followed the directions step by step, however my documents will not split. It opens up the doc with multiple links on them. Do you know how this can be fixed?
It saved mine in an "appdata" location. I copied and pasted the link into my browser, where I was able to move the files to the desired location
Brilliant! I struggle with this process once each quarter and it's always a battle and today it wouldn't work at all. After fighting all morning I found your vid which is simpler than my previous process which I got online a couple of years back, and it's worked first time. I've updated my notes and will do it this way in future. Took me a while to find this btw as all the other searches returned VBA macros which is an unnecessarily complex
Just want to chime in here with a huge THANK YOU as well! This has been a huge time saver for me, and there is no way I would have figured this out without your video. 🙏🙏🙏
Hi Chester. This is brilliant.. thank you so much, I had 347 in mine. 🎉🎉🎉. Job done in a few mins, time saver: you are a life saver 🎉🎉🎉
I would have never figured this out. You have saved me so much work. Thank you!!!
This works pretty well, except that when I do it, the header and footer is removed from the letter. Is there a way around that?
Thank you very much! Curious why it has to be heading 1 and not others. Also, this trick worked for saving the docs separately, but it did not retain my special design features I had around the document.
I was searching for this video since last year
Man, could've used this video today, got it for next month though, thank you! 👍👍
Thank you so much! You video is useful. However, I encountered problem that I'm unable to view the letter head on the split word document. Could you please advise the work around, many thanks
Thank you... thank you... thank you.... I was missing the 'Heading 1' piece!
I have found that when Save at the end of this process fails to produce any files in the folder you're using, the saved files you want may be stored on your hard drive in memory, eg: C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.MSO\odd version of your file name 012.docx
Oh come on it's helpful thankyou so much sir 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻 hope you always healthy and happy 🤝🏻🤝🏻🤝🏻
Thanks! Didn't work on my Mac, but worked perfectly on my PC.
You just saved me about 3 hours of work!
Wonderful idea to split letters, thank you so much.
Worked an absolute treat and saved hours of frustration - thanks ever so much!
This works great, though I'm having two issues: 1) My original mail merge document has a header in it, which consists of an image and some text. The header doesn't appear in Outline view, and therefore is not appearing in any of the generated Word files. 2) My original mail merge document is only one page, but in the resulting individual files the text is split over three pages. The process is adding in a bunch of extra blank lines. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks for this!
I have the same problem, did you find a solution?
@@mpunks @geirjaegersen2528 - I'm having the same problem with the extra page. Has anyone found a solution?
Hi, thank you for your tips. But my header and footer went missing. Is there any way i can fix it?
Super, Thanks a million. Saved lot of time with simple steps.
You saved me so much time!!!! Thankssssssss!!!!!!!!!
its so dumb you got to go through this process. Thank you
Thank you very much for the video It really helped me. At first It did not work for me then I checked some of the comments, Luckily I found my answer in the comments.
this is amazing! thank you very much sir!
Thanks a lot. It is really going to make my work easy.
BRILLIANT!!!
Thank you so much!
Great video!! Really helpful. However, could this be done using any other style to separate the files? I am using the Title 1 for the document and an index, so if I try to do it like you did, each section becomes its own document. Thank you very much in advance.
Thank you. Very helpful ❤
It worked. Thanks.
This was really helpful. Thank you.
Great tip, very helpful!
This is very helpful, I am running into an issue though - instead of creating separate files it is creating a new word document with links to open new word file - any suggestions. thank you
Just in case anybody runs into this issue. You need to save your file on a local folder and not on onedrive
Brilliant thanks.
Super Helpful!
This is perfect, is there a way to save the files in pdf format?
Thank you
I'm creating individual forms for different company departments using mail merge. In the past, I just cycled through each individual preview, saved the file with the department name, and reopened, saying "no" to the prompt to engage the mail merge. That has worked for me in the past, but now I can seem to "break" the mail merge in the document. When I say "no" and save again, it still engages the mail merge when I reopen. So I googled and found your video, which is great! But I encountered a problem. Word 365 recently changed the default template, which uses a different font, paragraph and line spacing, and color palette. All of the individual documents that were created following your steps above swapped out my original formatting for the new formatting. Perhaps if I change "default" and the various "heading" levels to my preference, rather than the format Word is forcing on me?
I have two pages document with 88 pages altogether which means 44 letters but adding a heading on the first page is not working correctly. It breaks the section properly but as soon as I click on "Create" I get the error message "The selection does not consist of heading levels"
It’s because you must have another data above the heading 1
this was great however it did not save to the actual folder the main letter was located in. I had to search for it and it saved it to a funky place. my mail merge was not a letter therefore I had to add their name to the top part and hide it so it would save them according to the name of the individual. It took me a while but i finally got it. thank you for this tutorial.
Thank you so much . This is brilliant. Any idea how to add a header and footer automatically?
yep, press:
Alt_Cntrl_1
You press this command at what time?
This doesn't work if your starting document is a table.
Very clear video, but it still only saves a single document. And when I click the links in the subdocuments, the formatting is weird. (missing the Heading image, adding extra line breaks between paragraphs).
Thank you very much for this important lesson... I have a problem when I split the documents then all the format are changed such as letter types, size... etc and I dont know why or how can I prevent this to happen.. would you help please?
thanks!
It kind of worked but:
1. it took 45 minutes to generate 75 documents (on the newest M2 macbook)
2. all files had not file ending (docx. missing) so I need to rename each file in order to use it as a word document
For my needed 580 pages it would run all night long.
Isn´t there an app to do that? I saw one which is generating PDF but I need docx.
But it helps allready a lot.
Thank you! How would I create separate PDF documents?
Great question. You can save a word doc manually as a pdf using SaveAs. I wonder how this would work for a mail merge.
@@lankatax I believe you can't do that through mail merge. You can add plugins to Word that'll allow you to do so. I wrote a JS script that converts all my word docs into PDFs
Splendid!!!
Please can you advise on how to save documents individually on office 365.. works perfectly on 201u but can't get it to work on 365
Fab but no good if you have headers or footers
I had a number of problems. Firstly it saved the documents in some system file location that I couldn't access easily...[.... AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.MSO\...]. I had hyperlinks to open each but then found that it didn't save the header (logo)and footer (address, etc) information. For now I'm just going to have to print and scan each letter individually but would love to know what has gone wrong. Frustrated!
What if you have a logo at the top? I tried to add a blank line, but it doesn't seem to work.
I figured this out, but now each individual document has a blank page at the end - I removed footer/header - there is nothing that I can see - need help please.
Hi, I tried this but the header of the main document didn't come up in any of the merged files. Any solution
Can you export a mail-merge database that saved inside word?
on the final step when saving individual documents it changes the format, moving all the tables. How can this be repaired?
does this work for microsoft word on the macbook? I've tried the steps but when i select all on the outline view and click create, but nothing happens
This didn't work for me. I followed all the instructions, but after the last step there are no new documents in the folder, just the one "all letters" master document. Not sure if there's some extra save step at the end? I tried save, and save as but neither worked.
This wasn't working for me and I tried it several times!! It turns out I was working on files in OneDrive and trying to save the separate files to OneDrive. As soon as I changed to my local workstation, it worked perfectly.
YOU ARE A SAINT!!!!!!!!!!!!! You should get knighted!
I have been able to complete this, however the save destination is a hidden location deep within windows files, in hidden system folders that I cannot access due to company's settings - not the location I start the merge in. Is there anyway for me to point word to the correct save location? Anyone else have an issue with this? This is the location it is saving to: C:\Users\my.name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\Content.MSO\IndividualFile1.docx
Yes, I'm getting this too. Did you find a solution?
Im not able to save the file individually since it has a header and a footer, what to do
I am getting a prompt "Word can not create subdocument within a table". Can you help
an extra page is added at the end. i have used only one page format but i am getting and extra 2nd blank page in all the individual documents. can we rectify
Can you export or copy mail-merge fields from one word document to another?
Hi, I don't think so as the doc needs to have the data source identified hth
Does this work on documents of 9 pages? I recently ran a mail merge with a 9 page document which worked great, but I need to separate out each of the documents.
It worked on my 4 page doc.
when you click save, how did you manage to have all the files named after the recipient names? can you customize how the files are named to a specific column?
I think Word automatically named the documents with the first word of each file. Here it took the Addressee's name as it was the first word of each document after empty Heading1. My workaround was to Type the desired document name in Heading1 style and then change its colour to white so that it's not visible. The name was also a merged field chosen from excel data.
@@arunbillion I did the same for naming my files. When your individual documents saved, was there a blank page at the end of each one?
I am facing an issue with heading1 style.
So i want to create documents which start with the "Product Code" - "product Description" - "Company Name".
e.g.
AB-9999 - N&A Apple Flavor - ABC Company
I did follow your steps but turns out all files were created with only the 1st 2 Characters of the 1st merged field (Product Code) before "-".
After a couple of tries with different scenarios, the conclusion is, Outlined files only create with only one merged field as document name and without special characters like "-&@...etc".
Please if you know how to work around, do let me know because I don't want to use Macros.
is it possible to save individual files into pdf?
Did you rename the file manually, or was the merging that named the file with the people names?
I think Word automatically named the documents with the first word of each file. Here it took the Addressee name as it was the first word of each document after empty Heading1. My work around was to Type the desired document name in Heading1 style and then changing its colour to white so that its not visible. The name was also a merged field chosen from excel data.
Your video was crystal-clear. But unfortunately it didn't work. Honestly, I'm losing the will to live! Why is this stuff so needlessly complicated?
I’m facing “the selection does not consist of heading levels”
Pls help us
This is greaat
Awesome until it dropped letterhead
Thank you it's very helpful!!!
You're welcome!
Word can not create subdocument within a table". Can you help?
I followed the steps, it's saved one word file